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Language: en
so do you think suffering is fundamental
to happiness along these lines suffering
is the result of caring about things
that you cannot change and if you are
able to change what you care about to
those things that you can change you
will not suffer well then would you then
be able to experience happiness yes but
happiness itself is not important
happiness is like a cookie when you are
a child you think cookies are very
important and you want to have all the
cookies in the world you look forward to
being an adult because then you have as
many cookies as you want right yes but
as an adult you realize a cookie as a
tool it's a tool to make you eat
vegetables and once you eat your
vegetables
anyway you stop eating cookies for the
most part because otherwise you will get
diabetes and will not be around for your
kids yes but then the cookie the
scarcity of a cookie if scarcity is
enforced nevertheless so like the
pleasure comes from the scarcity yes
but the happiness is a cookie that your
brain bakes for itself
it's not made by the environment the
moment cannot make you happy it's your
appraisal of the environment that makes
you happy and if you can change the
appraisal of the environment which you
can learn too then you can create
arbitrary states of happiness and some
meditators fall into this trap so they
discover the room this basement room in
their brain where the cookies are made
and they indulge in stuff themselves and
after a few months it gets really old
and the big crisis of meaning comes
because they thought before that their
unhappiness was the result of not being
happy enough so they fix this right they
can release the neurotransmitters at
will if they train and then the crisis
of meaning pops up at a deeper layer and
the question is why do I live how can I
make a sustainable civilization that is
meaningful to me I'll kinda insert
myself into this and this was the
problem that you couldn't solve in the
first place well at the end of all this
let me then ask that same question what
is that the answer to that what could
the possible answer be of the meaning of
life what what could an answer be what
is it to you I think that if you look at
the limiting of life you look at what
the cell is little the knife is the cell
is cell yes or this principle the cell
it's this self-organizing thing that can
participate in evolution in order to
make it work it's a molecular machine it
Zef replicator an entropy extractor and
the Turing machine if any of these parts
is missing you don't have a cell and
decay is not living right and life is
facing the emergent complexity over that
principle once you have this intelligent
super molecule the cell there's very
little that you cannot make it to it's
probably the optimal compute for
nietzermann especially in terms of
resilience it's very hard to sterilize
the plant at once it's infected with
life so it's active function of these
three components over this super cell of
cell is as present in the cell is
present in us and it's just the are just
an expression of the surge the certain
layer of complexity and the organization
of cells that so in a way it's tempting
to think of the cell as a von neumann
probe if you want to build intelligence
on other planets the best way to do this
is to infect them with cells and wait
for long enough and visit reasonable
chance the stuff is going to evolve into
an information processing principle that
is general enough to become sentient
whether that idea is very akin to sort
of the same dream and beautiful ideas
that are expressed the cellular automata
in their most simple mathematical form
you just inject the system with some
basic mechanisms of replication so our
basic rules amazing things would emerge
that the cell is able to do something
that James Hardie called existential
design he points out that in technical
design we go from the outside in we work
in a highly controlled environment in
which everything is deterministic like
about computers of our labs or our
engineering workshops and then we use
this determinism to implement a
particular kind of function that we
dream up and that seamlessly interfaces
with all the other deterministic
functions that we already have in our
world so it's basically from the outside
in and that logical systems designed
from the inside out is seed will become
a seedling by taking some of the
relatively unorganized
matter around it and turn it into its
own structure and thereby subdue the
environment and cells can cooperate if
they can rely on other cells having a
similar organization that is already
compatible but unless that's that's
there the cell needs to divide to create
that structure by itself right so it's a
self organizing principle that works on
a sum
chaotic environment and the purpose of
life in the sense is to produce
complexity and the complexity allows you
to harvest negentropy gradients that you
couldn't harvest without the complexity
and in the sense intelligence and life
are very strongly connected because the
purpose of intelligence is to allow
control and the conditions of complexity
so basically you shift the boundary
between the ordered systems into the
realm of the chaos of chaos you build
bridge sets into a chaos with complexity
and this is what we are doing this is
not necessarily a deeper meaning I think
the meaning that we have priors for that
we evolved for outside of the priors
there is no meaning meaning only exists
if a mine projects it right yeah there
is holy civilization I think that what
feels most meaningful to me is to try to
build and maintain the sustainable
civilization and taking a sliced Abad
outside of there we talked about a man
with a beard and God but something some
mechanism perhaps must have planted the
seed the initial seed of the cell do you
think there is a God what is a God and
what would that look like
so if there was no spontaneous
abiogenesis in the sense that the first
cell formed by some happy random
accidents where the molecules just
happened to be in the right consultation
to each other but there could also be
the mechanism of that allows for the
random I mean there's like Turtles all
the way down there seems to be there has
to be a head turtle at the bottom and
what I'm siddur something really wild
imagine is it possible that a gas giant
could become intelligent but would that
involve so imagine you jet you have
vortices that spontaneously emerge on
the gas giants like big storm systems
that in draw for thousands of years
and some of these form systems would use
electromagnetic fields because some of
the clouds are ferromagnetic or
something and as a result they can
change how certain clouds react rather
than other clouds and thereby produce
some self-stabilizing patterns that
eventually to regulation feedback loops
nested feedback loops and control so
imagine you have such this thing that
basically has emergent self-sustaining
self-organizing complexity in a
some point this wakes up and realizes in
basically Lam Solaris I am a sinking
planet
yes but I will not replicate because I
cannot recreate the conditions of my own
existence somewhere else I'm just
basically an intelligence that has
spontaneously formed because it could
and now it builds of anointment probe
and the best for normal purpose at
resting might be the cell so maybe it
will because it's very very clever and
very enduring create cells and sends
them out and one of them has infected
our planet and I'm not suggesting that
this is the case but it would be
compatible with the prints permian
hypothesis and it was my intuition that
our biogenesis is very unlikely it's
possible but it's you probably need to
roll the cosmic dice very often maybe
more often than they are planetary
surfaces I don't know so god is just a
large enough a system that's large
enough that allows randomness now I
don't think that God has anything to do
with creation
I think it's a mistranslation of the
time would into the catholic mythology i
think that Genesis is actually the
childhood memories of a god so the when
sorry that he Anna says is the world the
childhood memories of a God it's
basically a mind that is memory
remembering how it came into being and
we typically interpret Genesis is the
creation of a physical universe by a
supernatural being yes and I think when
you'll read it there is light in
darkness that is being created and then
you discover sky and ground you create
them you will construct the plants and
the animals and you give everything that
in their names and so on that's
basically cognitive development it's a
sequence of steps that every mind is to
go through then it makes sense of the
world and then you have children you can
see how initially they distinguish light
and darkness and then they make out
directions in it and they discover sky
and ground and they discover the plants
and the animals and they give everything
their name and it's an creative process
that happens in every mind because it's
not given right your mind has to invent
these structures to make sense of the
patterns on your retina also if there
was some big nerd who set up a server
and runs this world on it
this would not create a special
relationship between us and the nerd
this nerd would not have the magical
power to give me
to our existence right so this equation
of a creator god is the god of meaning
is a slate of hand you shouldn't do it
the other one that is done in
Catholicism is the equation of the first
mover the prime mover of Aristotle which
is basically automaton that runs the
universe earth total says if things are
moving and things seem to be moving here
something must move them right if
something moves them something must move
the thing that is moving it so there
must be a prime mover this idea to say
that this prime mover is a supernatural
being is complete nonsense right it's an
automaton in the simplest case so we
have to explain the anomaly that this
automaton exists at all but again we
don't have any possibility to infer
anything about its properties except
that it's able to produce change and
information right so there needs to be
some kind of computational principle
this is all there is but to say this
automaton is identical again with the
creator of first cause over the thing
that gives meaning to our life is
confusion now I think that what we
perceive is the higher being that we are
part of and the higher being that we are
part of is the civilization it's the
thing in which we have a similar
relationship as the cell has 12 a body
and we have this prior because we have
evolved to organize in these structures
so basically the Christian God in its
natural form without the mythology if
you undress it it's basically the
Platonic form of the civilization as the
is the ideal so it's this idea that you
try to approximate when you interact
with others not based on your incentives
but on what you think is right Wow we
covered a lot of ground and we left with
one of my favorite lines and there's
many which is happiness is a cookie that
brain bakes itself it's been a huge
honor and a pleasure to talk to you I'm
sure our paths will cross many times
again Joshua thank you so much for
talking today earlier Thank You Lex it's
so much fun I enjoyed it awesome
you